


Without a Script

by minkhollow



Category: Warehouse 13
Genre: Awesome Ladies Ficathon, Gen, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-07-04
Updated: 2010-07-04
Packaged: 2017-10-10 09:41:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 504
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/98252
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/minkhollow/pseuds/minkhollow
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Claudia has a dream about her brother that helps settle an argument with her foster parents.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Without a Script

**Author's Note:**

> For the prompt _Now I see her feel the fire/Now I know she needs me there to share/I'm nowhere_. Set about six years pre-canon, and working on the assumption that Claudia is 22 at the time of her debut episode.  
> I am not Syfy; I'm just borrowing for fun and awesome.

"No! I already _told_ you why not, why do you want to hear it again?"

Claudia's foster parents are... okay, she guesses, at least most of the time. They're not Joshua, but she does her best not to hold that against them. But there are times she _really_ wants to punch them in the face, or something, and this is one of them; the last thing she wanted to do with her Christmas is spend it explaining why she doesn't want to go back to college.

Unfortunately, they're not taking no for an answer, so when her foster mother asks for the sixth time, she sighs.

"It's a waste of my time and money," she says. "My classmates are more interested in where their next beer is coming from than talking to the sixteen-year-old computer geek, there's only one class that's remotely challenging, and the prof of that class doesn't think I can possibly know what I'm talking about." She even hacked into the guy's personal files to prove her point, and the dude still didn't get it. "I'm not having fun, and I'm old enough to make this call. I'm dropping out."

"Your parents would want you to keep going," her foster father says, and Claudia snorts.

"Dude, try again." She was six when they died, after all; the opinion of people she barely remembers isn't going to shape her decision-making process that much.

Her foster mother purses her lips. "Your brother would want you to stay in school."

Claudia freezes, then stalks out of the kitchen and to her room. She doesn't know what Joshua would want, can't guess for the life of her, but that low blow was _completely_ unnecessary, and now she's second-guessing herself.

She has a dream about Joshua that night. She usually has two a year, one on her birthday and one on the anniversary of the... thing, but this isn't the first one she's had at Christmas. She remembers the day she's dreaming about; Joshua was fed up with how long the differential equation was taking, and they went from there to talking about college in general.

"But what if I don't like it?" she says. "I mean... you like it, and you're frustrated."

Joshua looks at her for a few moments, then smiles. "If you don't like it, you'll be old enough to drop out by then. We'll come up with something for you to do. You're the last person on this planet who needs a degree to prove you know what you're talking about."

"Are you sure?"

"I'm very sure. The last thing I want to see you doing is wasting your potential."

Claudia wakes up smiling, the next morning, and calls the registrar to drop out after breakfast. When her foster parents ask, she says that she knows exactly what Joshua would want, and he'd want her to keep her sanity and get to the top in her own way.

If she didn't know better, she'd say Joshua knew she needed to hear that.


End file.
